But that was twenty year agone, and Nicholas Bewes had grown oldish himself now, and Jane was thought to be nearer eighty than seventy by her neighbours.  Friends she had not, except for Mrs. Cobley; but there’s no doubt, though a much younger woman, Mary Cobley had a sort of feeling for Jane; and there was Milly Boon also—­Jane’s orphan niece, who lived along with her and kept house for her.  She was a good friend too.

The adventure began, you may say, when a returned native came back to Little Silver, and ’twas Mary Cobley’s son Jack who did so.

He’d gone to sea when he was fifteen, but kept in touch with his folk and left the sea and found work in the West Indies and bided there for five-and-twenty years.  And now he came back, brown as a berry and ugly as need be.  At forty you might say Jack Cobley couldn’t be beat for plainness; and yet, after all, I’ve seen better-looking men that was uglier, if you understand me, because, though his countenance put you in mind of an old church gargoyle, yet it was kindly and benevolent in its hideousness, and he had good, trustful eyes; and, to the thinking mind, a man’s expression matters more than the shape of his mouth or the cut of his nose.

Jack hadn’t much to say about his adventures, for he was a very quiet man and better liked to list than talk; but he didn’t make no splash when he came back and he was content to settle with his mother and till her little vegetable patch.

He’d stand a drink at the ‘Man and Horse’ public-house and, if he felt himself among friends, he’d open out a bit and tell stories of the land where he had lived and worked; but he proved to be the retiring sort and hadn’t got anything to say about money.  In fact, it didn’t seem to be a subject that interested him over much and there was nothing in his apparel, or manner of life, or general outlook that seemed to show as he’d done very well in foreign parts.

So the people came to the natural conclusion that if he’d made any sort of pile, it was a small one, while some folk went to extremes and reckoned that Jack had come back to his mother without a bean, and was content to live on her and share her annuity.  Because Mrs. Cobley, though her husband left little beyond his cottage, which was his own, took one hundred and fifty pounds per annum for life under the will of the last lady of the Manor of Little Silver.

Mary had served her ladyship as maid for fifteen years before she took Cobley, and she was a tower of strength to that important woman and had come to be generously remembered according.

So Jack was a mystery, in a manner of speaking.  He bought himself a horse, and a good one, and was very fond of riding round about over the moor and joining in a meet of foxhounds sometimes; but that was his only pleasure; and his mother, when a woman here and there asked if her son was minded to wed, would answer that she’d never heard him unfold his feelings on that matter, and reckoned he’d got no intentions towards the women.